Heatmap, Hot or Not? Free Alternatives for Crazy Egg

Heatmaps are graphical overlays of your website which points out what content is hot and what not. This is the third part of the article about the heatmaps and alternatives for Crazy Egg. If you have any other suggestions, please let me know or drop a comment below.

Clickheat

Another free heatmap comes from Labs Media and is called Clickheat. This open source application uses php and needs to be installed on your server. To make things easier, they developed Clickheat as a wordpress plugin as well.

After several search strings into google I came across this article on heatmaps written by Matt Ridout and gave me some new insights of Labs Media. Apparently the plugin adds a little link into your webpages back to the website of Labs Media, which can conflict with some searchengines. It’s not difficult to remove the link, but I’m not really fond of this kind of strategy.

Simple Heatmaps

SimpleHeatmaps has a very simplistic approach to heatmaps. SimpleHeatmaps does what it says and does it well. No unnecessary bells and whistles. So don’t expect any fancy filters (in fact, don’t expect any), additional information about your visitors or anything else that might be worth looking at. Maybe a bit too thin for my taste.

Beside the heatmaps (click, attention and scroll), it also offers live screen and form recording. The first month is completely free of charge. After that you will need to choose a paying plan if you would like to continue with the tool!

Corunet

The next free trackingsystem is called “The definite heatmap” by Corunet and is a “do it yourself solution“. Corunet gives you the opportunity to build your own heatmap, this way you have a better understanding how these programs work. For the lazy people among us: you can download all necessary files at the end of the tuturial.

Clickdensity

What I immediately liked about Clickdensity is the ease of implementation – just five lines of code – and the ease of use. With only four buttons you can choose between the normal heat map, the click map, the hover map and the page stats. The page stats however shows minimal information because Clickdensity does not collect much data other than the X and Y coordinates of the clicks to generate the heatmap. You can filter the clicks by browser, click time, date and screen size.

A very nice feature is the ability to attach the X and Y click coordinates to a certain element of your page. This can be necessary when you update your website on regular bases with new content, meaning a change in lay-out. A minor setback however is that it takes quiet some time to generate the heatmap overlays. They offer a 30 day trail, in which you can fully test the functionalities. If you’re looking for a straightforward and easy to use heatmap application without extensive analytical information, you should definitely try Clickdensity.

As mentioned before, heatmaps are better used on static websites than dynamic ones. The content on dynamic website is often changed (e.g. new posts/comments on blogs), this in contrast with the coordinates of the recorded clicks made by the visitors. This shouldn’t be a problem if you update your blog/website monthly and attract a serious amount of visitors.

Picnet Mouse Eye Tracking

Registration is currently disabled.

This Australian company, named Picnet, has two heatmap systems: the eye tracking heatmap and the click heatmap. The name “eye tracking heatmap” can be a bit misleading because there is no eye tracking going on. Picnet justifies the name with the result of certain studies, which claims:

“There is a strong correlation (84%) between the regions of website pages scanned by your eyes and the regions visited by the mouse cursor. Additionally, 88% of regions that are not scanned by the eyes are also not visited by the mouse cursor.”

So instead of tracking the eyes, Picnet tracks the mouse movements.

There are two ways to display the click heatmap – a general map of the sectors your visitors are scanning with their eyes, and a more detailed view that shows the pattern of mouse clicks on each area of the page. It also tracks mouse movements and shows you the website architecture and user movements throughout the website.

If you subscribe for a free account, you need to mention Picnet’s website with a small line of text which is provided by them. To get rid of this text you will need to upgrade to a premium account, which costs A$2,000 per annum per domain or A$500 per month per domain.

The free account however delivers very useful information but has some downsides.For example, it doesn’t keep your data longer than 2 weeks, it doesn’t record any keyboard interaction (which is useful for investigating your forms) and it does’t show user interactions with the page (so no AJAX or drop down menu’s for example).

What you should read next

Paul Olyslager

Paul is the creator, editor and most regular writer of paulolyslager.com. He's also working as UX Lead for Home24, a leading online shop for furniture and home accessories, based in Berlin, Germany. Read all about Paul or find him on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

If the cost-benefit ratio was ok, then this would be a great solution… but only for those websites which attract a lot of visitors. More visitors means more clicks to be recorded, so they would certainly benefit of a second server.

I am new to the world of web analytics and i think the functions are unbeleivable. I have an online private business and it has always been so frustrating to me how i could not observe the activity of my customers. I came accross ClickTale analytics on a similar blog and i tried out the free option offered and my eyes have been opened. I now feel confident to adjust my website according to the behaviour i can see in the videos and all the heatmaps. Its so simple and so effective, I wish i had found it earlier.

Hi, I found your page when i was searching Google for sites related to this article. I have tell you, your site is good. I like the design too, its nice. I don’t have the time at the moment to fully read your website but I have noted it and I also registered for your RSS feed. I will be back in a day or two. Thanks for a great website.

Regarding clickheat – I installed it on the checkout pages of a store to see how people used the page.

A while later the site owner complained that when he viewed the checkout pages he got the IE ‘this page contains secure and insecure content’ error, and he worried that this was reducing the conversion rate. I checked and checked and checked again, and I couldn’t find any non-https images.

Eventually I finally realised what was happening – it was the clickheat script that was the insecure content on the https page!

@Stuart: Hi Stuart, nice to hear that you like this list and thanks for your interesting comment. I’ve been using Clickheat sporadically for a few months now (actually only used it to write this article and test it a bit) and I never crossed this IE error message before. The implemented code from Clickheat seems a bit aggressive and maybe a good thing to keep it out of the secure checkout pages. I can imagine that the CR dropped down a bit because of this message, but maybe you can switch to a less intrusive package. Although I find Clickheat’s system interesting (follow the mousemovements of the visitor), I prefer to use A/B testing in checkout pages to increase the CR.

Interesting article. We have also created our own heatmap service at http://intuitionhq.com, and at $9 a test we think it’s very reasonably priced. We’ve designed it to be simple, quick and easy to use, and we think it works pretty well in that respect.

If you’d like to give it a go, please email me back on this address, or contact us on twitter @intuitionhq – we’d happily set you up with some free tests if you’d like to have a play.

You should try http://mouseflow.com that gives you heatmaps on mouse movements and clicks, but more importantly records whole visitor sessions (including mouse movements, clicks, scroll events and keystrokes) and lets you watch the whole thing in your browser.

@Owen McGab Enaohwo: Hi Owen and thank you for the reply. When I was doing the research for this article I had to know what Crazy Egg was all about in order to form a better opinion. I have to say that Crazy Egg is a very good heatmap system, but nothing more, noting less. For a paying alternative I would recommend Mouseflow because it gives you much more than a heatmap system. The live streaming is a very nice feature but it also provides you with plenty of statistics and a scroll heatmap. Don’t forget to retweet this article to get 500 free recordings :) .

As for a free alternative, I would go with clickdensity. It is similar to Crazy Egg but doesn’t have the nice interface.

@Paul Olyslager: After reading your blog post and asking my previous question, I installed the free Picnet and in a couple of months I will be moving on to Mouseflow (which is subscription based). I even compare Mouseflow to Clicktales and I think Mouseflow provide more bang for less money.

gerorge says

Fantastic article. I have just install mouseflow. I was between mouseflow and clicktale but the price was the main reason i choose mouseflow. My main concern is security. I have install also the proxy.php file in order to track shopping cart etc. How secure is this? Any ideas?

Lasse Schou says

@gerorge: Hi, if your website is running SSL, all data transmitted to Mouseflow is also encrypted. You can even adjust the php proxy script so that it sends data to https://… instead of http://.

If you’re not using SSL then all data is transmitted unencrypted across the network, including the compressed mouseflow data.

If you want more information about Mouseflow security, feel free to post specific questions.

@Ed: Hi Ed, at the time I was writing this post I had ClickTale, Crazy Egg, Mouseflow and Google Analytics running. It didn’t give me any script problems, just make sure that everything works smoothly before you install something else. Loading time could be affected. I hope this answers your question?

Clickheat has been reported to place hidden links on your website, and can cause your site to drop from google rankings. Do a Google search on this, I’ve already found a few articles warning people of this.

I’ve tried mouseflow. Despite giving you an aesthetically pleasing heatmap, the states are extremely misleading and unreliable. I don’t advise it at all.

Clickdensity is crap.

Clicktale is amazing! Tis hands-down the best, but bloody expensive.

I’ve tried picnet before with poor results, but have just decided to give it a second go.

Another one to add to the list is Seevolution, which is new and free at the moment. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get it to work properly on my site yet, but I’ll see how things go. (The support team is very helpful btw, but they don’t work weekends :( )

@Sammie Fields: Hi Sammie, could you please elaborate on the misleading and unreliable heatmaps? I’m thinking that you might have a centered website, but haven’t set the alignment and width in the Mouseflow control panel. This may lead to displaced heatmaps. Unfortunately Mouseflow cannot automatically detect the alignment and width of the website.

I totally recommend mouseflow. This real time recording is an amazing feature and gives you real feedback from your visitors. It doesn’t support google maps and a couple of tiny things beacause it’s within other iframes etc. but that’s fair enough. I tried also Seevolution which seems promising but it’s not as helpful as mouseflow can be. It’s exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the article.

Ehavior gives you the first 2000 clicks for free so that you can try it out and be convinced.

One of our products prime features is the integration with your Google Analytics account. This allows you to segment your click data by every advanced Google Analytics segment. Some examples of use are: – Evaluate paid (SEM) clicks against non-paid (organic) clicks. – See where visitors that purchased from you clicked. See where those that did not purchase anything clicked. – Evaluate new vs. returning visitors.

The only limitation is your imagination (and the data available in your Google Analytics account :-))…

Thanks for keeping this article updated. I use WordPress and find it seems to have a plugin for almost anything you can think of. These will definitely help me to improve my own website conversions and will be a good addition to my tool kit. Thanks

40-02 says

Try metrika.yandex.com. It is simple and powerful free web analytycs service from Russian Search Engine

thank you for your comment. This article has been written a while ago, so some heatmap applications might have changed their payment options. I will give you a quick overview:

– Feng-Gui is not longer a free service, as stated in the article. Minimum of $2,5 per image. – The first heatmap WordPress-plugin hasn’t been updated in over 2 years, so I wouldn’t use it anymore. – Clickheat and Corunet are OpenSource software and free of charge. – ClickDensity offers a free trail of 30 days. – Mouseflow has changed their payment options, with €10/month and 30 day money back guarantee. – Picnet only has a free demo, which was mentioned in the original article. – Patrick Wied’s heatmap system is an OpenSource JavaScript library and free of charge.

I hope this list answered your question a bit. At the moment I’m working on a new list, which will include both free and paying services.

I would like to point out that we found Corunet to be a useful solution at some point. It’s pretty flexible, but perhaps it takes a tech savvy person to implement.

Best, Susan of WebMeUp.Com

Ellen L. says

Thanks Paul, you did a really great job here! I personally use a killer combination of Mouseflow and Website Auditor for my projects. First I polish up all on-site optimization aspects, like duplicate content, broken links, code errors, robot.txt, XML sitemap, plus analyze page elements where keywords can be strategically placed (title, headings, ALT text, meta tags)in WebSite Auditor. And then I use Mouseflow do check how fixing on-page issues impacts user behavior. This works all the way around too: if I discover that there are usability problems on site – and this is something MouseFlow is excellent at – I do use WebSite Auditor again to fix them out.

There is a free trial option that allows to test up to for 10 000 pages for free. This particular tool have several benefits that are usually not available in other platforms, including heatmaps for dynamic website elements.

It generates Click Heatmaps and offers Click and Tap Playback! It works with Fluid layouts so it will playback a user session if they are on a Mobile device or desktop computer. If you have media queries that change the layout on the page, when a mobile device hits it, we have a feature where you can enable Dynamic Content on the page and then apply the Heatmap or Play user sessions to reveal hot points on the dynamic elements! Playback of sessions overlays an optional path with arrows (click 1,2,3 etc). There is even an instant playback speed. The Dashboard runs on your site and works on a Smart Phone or Desktop computer. At heatmap.ca there is a page of visual analytics including clicks by Country, State, City, Time of Day, Day of week, Tablets, Phones, etc.

This is not a limited tool…you get 500,000 clicks per month, Unlimited Views, you can monitor 100 pages per month across multiple domains.

On a personal note, I thought it was about time this type of service was available to all small to medium sized businesses as a free service. I am giving something back to the community. Enjoy!

Rob I welcome your feedback and if you have any questions, let me know.

Hotspots User Tracker is a free WordPress plugin which provides heat maps for mouse clicks and touch screen taps. It also caters for responsive web design, difference devices and zoom levels. It’s free, no signup required. All of the data is stored locally in your database.

I used inspectlet.com for heatmap and wepify.com for CMS and they both works great! They have free plan.

Cheers

David says

This is a new software that allows you to have a clear picture of your site. Includes heat maps, exit polls and feedback, online surveys, analysis of funnels and many other features. It is the most complete tool of its kind. Be sure to see it, because they are in pre launch at an incredible Price or even free. http://www.hotjar.com/4652

Hi Paul, nice post! I’d also like to add Decibel Insight (DI) in within the mix. It’s similar to CrazyEgg, but on steroids. We’d love you and everyone else to give it a go for free! Please get in contact for more info :)

Thanks for letting us know about your tool. Would I be able to get a try-out account?

Sarah says

Thanks for sharing! I have just discovered Heatmap software recently and it´s great. In case you are interested Visitlead Live chat also is offering this feature now in conjunction with its real time analytics: https://visitlead.com/features

Marcelo Oliveira says

Why don’t just buy a Heatmap Script or WordPress Plugin. It’s much better then pay other companies per month. I got one here http://goo.gl/nDYhIo

Great article, you should also compare these software to one that are using eye-tracking (www.realeye.io). As far as I know, most of decision making process is happening even before first mouse movement!

Hi Paul thanks so much for this post – exactly what I was looking for. I want to try a heatmap on my clients’ sites, to see how visitors are consuming content. I have am a consultant (www.lisachapman.com ) one of my specialties is getting local companies ranked in one of the top 3 spots in Google’s Local Map 3-Pack. Optimizing content for Google’s preferences is part of our work for organic ranking and it’s every client’s challenge. Heatmaps seem to be a great tool to understand visitors’ interests. I’m excited to try it! I appreciate that you’ve included free options, so we can try several and get to know them before we commit to one. Even the paid tools are not very expensive, but it’s the time you spend learning the tools and setting it up that’s costly for any of them. I’d love to see that aspect covered more in reviews. You’ve mentioned it, which I appreciate. [Oh by the way, the links for SeeVolution are both 404s – Page Not Found. M French’s link is also 404.] Your tribe has added a lot of comments, for TONS of extra value. All around, love this post!. ps – please make comment links open in a new window – for convenience!

thanks for the comment and a great idea to include the learning curve as one of the parameters as well.

It’s true that installing and setting up a tool can take quite some time, especially when you consider testing the impact on loading speed, data security, GDPR compliance, etc.

In my experience, integrating such tools on bigger websites does take longer than the average trial period, since the implementation is not often the highest priority on the backlog. This is in no way because of the tool itself, rather the internal process of integrating such 3rd party tools. Often you can extend the trial period just by explaining the situation to the software developers.

And thank you for letting me know about the dead link. That should be fixed now. Let me return the favour by letting you know that http://www.lisachapman.com ends up with a error 500.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Yay! You've decided to leave a comment. That's fantastic! Please keep in mind that comments are moderated and rel="nofollow" is in use. So, please do not use a spammy keyword or else it will be deleted. Let's have a personal and meaningful conversation instead. Thanks for dropping by!